Distraction-preventing Software and Tools

Since lots of peo­ple are cur­rent­ly stuck at home because of the coro­na virus, and I real­ly want­ed to con­tribute to not­GDC this year, I’ve decid­ed to write about some­thing that I want­ed to share for a while now: tools to pre­vent your­self from get­ting dis­tract­ed while using a computer.

When using any inter­net-con­nect­ed device, the line between exer­tion and relax­ation can blur very quickly—and I can relate. In my case, one time dur­ing an intern­ship , I got side tracked and start­ed watch­ing… a Tetris com­pe­ti­tion. Of course I got caught: that was the moment where it dawned on me that the free­dom to get dis­tract­ed was too much respon­si­bil­i­ty for me. So I decid­ed to take away some of that free­dom, and opt­ed to add mea­sures on my com­put­er to achieve that. I’ve used a lot of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tools over the years, so I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned and what worked for me.

Some con­text, though. I’m 22 years old, lived in a stu­dent house for around the past four years, and for the last months I’ve lived in an apart­ment by myself, work­ing remote­ly. Most of the rec­om­men­da­tions here will be Win­dows appli­ca­tions or brows­er exten­sions. I also have as few apps on my phone as pos­si­ble to min­i­mize dis­trac­tion there (a “dumb­phone” of sorts).

Some of the meth­ods I’m using might be a lit­tle extreme, because I need it to stay sharp and moti­vat­ed. So you might not be able to use very sin­gle tip here, but I still hope these pieces of soft­ware and oth­er tips will suit your use cases!

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Best games of 2019!

That’s a wrap on 2019, the year where I bare­ly played Steam games in favor of itch, the year that Switch eShop dis­counts start­ed get­ting amaz­ing, and also a year where I grad­u­at­ed and moved away from my stu­dent house. Oh, and I also made a bunch of small­er games, while wrap­ping up Fake Illu­sions. Whew!

Here are some games I liked. Like last year, I just played these games this year, since I don’t real­ly care about their orig­i­nal release date. The order of games is also pret­ty much “in the order I can think of them”, so take it with a grain of salt. Maybe two.

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js13kGames — Back to the basics

I want­ed to par­tic­i­pate in js13k for a while now, so I final­ly took the dive, sim­i­lar­ly to 7drl this year. The result­ing game is called Back­Flipped, and you can play it on either the com­pe­ti­tion site or itch! Also, you can check out the source code on Github.

I had some goals:

• I was itch­ing to use Zdog to make a game! Zdog is a pseu­do-3D engine for 3D vec­tor art. Min­i­mized it’s around 29k, so it’s a bit bulky com­pared to the frame­works spe­cial­ly designed for js13k, but I can make all my oth­er assets using code now.
• I want to work out an idea I already have spook­ing around in my head for a while, and I oth­er­wise would not take the time for. Luck­i­ly, the jam theme was a good match for this idea.
• To get a js13k T‑shirt! Based on last year’s con­test you need to get into the over­all top 33% to win one, and I’m pret­ty con­fi­dent I can make that!

Here’s a lengthy post­mortem detail­ing my design deci­sions so I can refer to them lat­er, but also so oth­er peo­ple can learn! I might make a sep­a­rate post about all the opti­miza­tion tricks I used, but for now the js13k resources are very use­ful, and I tried most of the tricks list­ed there.

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7 Day Roguelike Challenge 2019 — Six sides of the same hex

So I made a rogue­like! I have a prob­lem with rogue­likes: the games are incred­i­bly pun­ish­ing, and usu­al­ly I can’t bring up the patience to con­tin­ue play­ing after five per­madeaths or so. Also, these games can be com­pli­cat­ed, with very lit­tle explanation—something I think is amaz­ing in most games, but can be very frus­trat­ing in a rogue­like where you’re thrown to the wolves almost instantly.

How­ev­er, I have been fas­ci­nat­ed by the genre, regard­less of my inabil­i­ty to actu­al­ly play the games. So when I saw 7drl was hap­pen­ing this year, I want­ed to make a min­i­mal­ist rogue­like, also known as a roguelite. Here’s an overview of the game­play of the game and how it was put togeth­er this way.

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Best of 2018

More years, more games! Look­ing back, I can only say one thing: Geez, I played a lot of games this year!

Like last years’ lists, this just list games I played this year, not nec­es­sar­i­ly games that released this year, in no par­tic­u­lar order. Also, only itch embeds this year because I’ve played a lot more games on itch, but also because all Steam embeds from last year’s list broke and I’m too lazy to add links/embeds for every­thing this time around.

It’s long, so you can skip straight to the Hon­or­able Men­tions and Books. Also, here’s 2017’s list.

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